No Sandbagging On This Course

Persian Gulf Getting A Plush Club

August 23, 1987|By Jonathan Broder, Chicago Tribune.

JABAL ALI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES — When golfers reminisce about the great courses of the world, those of the Persian Gulf usually don`t come to mind. For here, amid the vast Arabian desert, the fairways are 500-yard sandtraps, the tee is a portable square of AstroTurf, and the greens are called ``browns.``

Indeed, until now, golf in the Gulf has always been more novelty than sport, the sort of experience a dedicated duffer might seek so he could say back home when a colleague complained about parched greens: ``This is nothing. You should see the course in Abu Dhabi.``

In Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which comprises Abu Dhabi (also the name of the capital), Dubai and five other emirates, golf courses consist of sandy desert expanses that have been landscaped into fairways. There has been no grass until now because no one has been willing to expend the enormous amount of water necessary to keep the grass green.

Sand doesn`t hold a tee too well, so the Gulf golfer, driving a cart with special sand tires, begins each hole by drawing his wood and small patch of AstroTurf from his bag.

He plops down the square-foot piece of artificial turf at his feet, tees up the ball and drives his first shot onto the desert fairway. Gulf golfers prefer bright orange or lime-green balls so they can find them in the sand.

The sand courses have some advantages. Each fairway shot, for example, requires the player to use his portable patch of plastic grass, eliminating the problem of a bad lie.

The putting surfaces, like the fairways, also are sand. But to give the ball a realistic roll, the sand is mixed with oil and then hard-packed, deepening its color to a dark-brown. Kneeling in white pants to line up a putt is not advisable.

So golf in the Gulf has been, ever since the first desert course was built in Kuwait in the 1960s. But all that is about to change in January, when the area`s first 18-hole championship course opens in the seaside town of Jabal Ali.

What will make the 6,618-yard, par-72 Emirates Golf Club so special is natural grass-154 acres of it, rolling over the expertly landscaped desert course like a green carpet amid an ocean of sand.

The grass requires irrigation with a million gallons of desalinated water every day to prevent it from burning up under the merciless Arabian sun, says Larry Trenary, a Dallas-based engineer who is helping to supervise the final stages of the club`s construction.

The cost of irrigation alone will be about $5,000 a day, he says.

The $5 million club, designed by American sports architect Karl Litten of Boca Raton, Fla., also has four artificial lakes, a flood-lit driving range and palm trees and cactus imported from California and Arizona.

In addition, the course boasts an elaborate air-conditioned clubhouse, designed to look like a cluster of Bedouin tents, with a five-star restaurant, swimming pool, billiard room, bowling greens, squash and tennis courts, health club, saunas and Jacuzzis.

``The project started out just as a golf course, but it kept getting extended into other areas,`` said Trenary, who is Litten`s representative here. ``Now it has grown into something that encompasses just about all leisure club activities except for ice skating.``

The club is the pet project of the UAE`s powerful defense minister, Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, and forms the wedge of his campaign to make Dubai, already the major trading center in the Gulf, a magnet for

international sporting events and holiday tourism.

Sheik Mohammed, one of the world`s best-known owners of championship racehorses, is also building a modern racetrack in Dubai and hosts an annual road rally that pays one of the highest purses on the international racing circuit.

The bid to transform Dubai into the Pebble Beach of the Persian Gulf is quite a gamble, given that the city lies along the expanding perimeter of the Gulf War between Iran and Iraq.

Recent events in the region have uncomfortably placed the United Arab Emirates at their center.

Mines have been discovered off the UAE`s eastern Arabian Sea coast, and two ships have been hit so far. The warships of the United States, Britain, France and Soviet Union now routinely cruise off UAE shores to protect their shipping in the region.

But the golf club`s managers and coordinators still believe their project is a winner. From October to April, skies are sunny with temperatures in the high 70s, the beaches are clean and uncrowded, and Dubai`s resort hotels, which fly in fresh oysters from France every day, are as elegant as anything in Hawaii or Acapulco.

The club hopes to attract tourists, vacationers and golf tours from as far away as Japan, where a yearly membership in a golf club can cost as much as $800,000. But officials say there is already a healthy market among the thousands of Western expatriates working in the Gulf and the Middle East.